Archive for December, 2006

“What is the best idea to make money?” I stumble upon this question all the time. It’s all over webmaster forums and I assume other kinds of forums as well. People want the easiest way to make money on-line and they think by making countless threads in many different places, they will find someone who will tell them what to do in order to be rich.

Let me tell you a little something I saw two days ago. I was on the NYC subway and some homeless man came in our car. I immediately knew what he wanted, it was money. Rarely anyone would give money to a beggar on the subway. What I’ve seen at most is $1 given at any time, maybe $2 but very rarely. However, this guy was different. Instead of asking money like everyone else does, and telling people that they are going to put it to “honest” use, this guy was original. He asked people to please give him any kind of food, fruits, leftover McDonalds, or whatever else people had on them. He put a little bit of sense of humor in his speech and it worked perfectly. He got an apple, but most importantly about four people gave him money. So this guy made about $4 to $5 from just my subway car. What’s more surprising he came back 5 minutes afterwards, after he went through the other cars; with the few new people in he gave the same speech (still homeless, still hungry) was the only little twist he added, and he got some more money and a slice of pizza ($2.50). So in total this guy made about $10 in 10 minutes, awesome for a homeless man (oh he had a bag on his shoulder with what seemed to be all the food he had collected). Why was he better than the other beggars? Originality.

If you are one of these people that want to make money and go around asking, here is the answer. To make money on-line (or elsewhere), you need to come up with something original, something new, or perhaps something similar to what exists, but better (with a twist). The idea is quite simple, and if you understand the concept you will realize that no one will tell you a good idea, because they can benefit from it themselves. So you are only wasting your time asking, start thinking of what can set you apart from everyone else, and you will succeed. On-line, or elsewhere…

Quintura offers a different way to search pages, and although I am not a fan or can’t say I am gonna use it in the future, it is pretty cool. The reason I am not going to use it is that i am too used to the Google way. I am sure this is the case with everybody else, once you are used to Google you see no reason to change.

However, a week ago Quintura released a subdomain made just for kids. With results pulled from Yahoo! kids, and any potentially unsafe keywords blocked out, Quintura Kids is a good search engine to teach your kids how to use. I assume that for anyone younger than 11, the cloud way of searching should be fun as well.

So if you have kids, this is the search engine for you. And when I have kids (yeah right), i’ll teach them how to use it too.

PageRank is a very important metric these days. However, a lot of people are misinterpreting it. They are not only expecting too much of it, but do not really understand how it works.

Most of webmasters know PageRank changes with the amount of backlinks you get. A good amount of these webmasters think that PageRank is all that matters. This is wrong. PageRank updates at an average of every three months. This is what makes it a highly inaccurate metric. Of course, Google has the Live PageRank updated in real time but only they can access it. This is when webmasters go out looking for the Live PageRank in different places. They look in PageRank prediction tools; they look in the Google Directory, DMOZ, etc. This makes it quite amusing, as it is much easier than that.

The real PageRank is easy to find. My personal belief is that Google gives web sites page rank based on how often their spider comes up with a link to a site. It’s simple, nothing else matters. The PR of the page with the link on it is just a side effect. Every time Google comes through one of your links it follows it and gives you some PR juice. The more links it follows to your website the more your PageRank will increase. This one line explains all the mysteries about PageRank. It not only explains how it is obtained, what the real page rank is but more so why it is important to have backlinks in “high PageRank” websites, better addressed as, websites which google visits very often.

Based on this belief, it follows that a site could technically achieve a high PR, if it had 1 link on a PR0 page, and Googlebot was somehow malfunctioning and clicking on this same link over and over and over again, for a long time. This is quite easy to understand as it is exactly what happens. If you get a link from a PR7 page, with it alone you can achieve a PR5 (perhaps), because the PR7 site is being visited by the google spider so often, that this same spider keeps ending up at your site over and over. This is how subpages from PR9, PR10, get a high PR as well.

So basically, Live Page Rank is updated all the time, all you have to do is look at the number of backlinks, and these vary daily. I personally use the Yahoo! backlinks tool since this gives me a more accurate look on the number of backlinks I currently have. If you keep working on increasing those backlinks, your PageRank will skyrocket and Google spider will be all over your site, daily.

Of course, I have made my point and passed my beliefs onto you. Now you want proof. The best part about it is that I can present you with proof by just mentioning the site you are on right now, reading this blog post. Map100.com was started a month and a half ago. It had perhaps, 3 backlinks pointing to it. The domain was old, and died out. It was not updated at all and hence all the backlinks it had decreased. It had a measly PR1. I changed the whole purpose of the site, and started working on it. I built the site from scratch, made sure it is different from the thousands of directory sites out there and started my marketing campaign. According to Yahoo! we are up to around 160,000 backlinks which is pretty good. I would say it’s definitely enough for a PR5 next update, perhaps a PR6 (no ones knows, but do you care?). Googlebot visits the site very frequently. I have tracked the “cached” page updates Googlebot does on the website throughout two weeks now, and it is never older than 2-4 days on high page rank sites. This leads to the next accurate tool to check Live PageRank, the “last cached” tool. It is also a great metric for Live PageRank. Here are some stats that proof this point and back up my backlinks Live PageRank belief.

This is Google‘s cache of http://www.yahoo.com/ as retrieved on Dec 21, 2006 00:57:26 GMT.
PR9 site, last cached yesterday, obviously.

This is Google‘s cache of http://digg.com/ as retrieved on Dec 21, 2006 00:33:33 GMT. PR8 site, last cached yesterday.

This is Google‘s cache of http://en.wikipedia.org/ as retrieved on Dec 21, 2006 00:43:39 GMT.
PR9 subpage, great example. The subpage of Wikipedia has more PR and it is cached more often than the main page. Since more people link to the english part of the site, google spider visits it more often.

This is Google‘s cache of http://www.map100.com/ as retrieved on Dec 20, 2006 08:13:14 GMT.
Our lovely site with an ugly PR1, however, the cache suggest we’ll be out of the ugly gray PR bar soon. Who cares about the bar though, as long as Google visits us often 😉

This is Google‘s cache of http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ as retrieved on Dec 21, 2006 00:53:52 GMT.
PR7 subdomain but definitely more popular than the main domain. This is why a lot of DigitalPoint threads rank so high for different search engine terms. I wouldn’t be surprised if the forums get a higher PR next update due to their increasing popularity and countless new backlinks.

This is Google‘s cache of http://www.wikipedia.org/ as retrieved on Dec 17, 2006 05:42:44 GMT.
PR8 site, even though its the homepage, it is cached 5 days ago, much older than all the sites above. It is because it does not have as many backlinks pointing to it, hence not as many spider visits. I can come up with countless Wikipedia inner pages that are cached more often than the main page just because they have more links pointing to them.

This is Google‘s cache of http://www.myfreeguitar.com/ as retrieved on Dec 11, 2006 19:03:24 GMT.
A PR4 page proves my point, the cache is soon 2 weeks old, which proves cache is a very accurate tool for showing the Live PageRank of a site. One more example follows.

This is Google‘s cache of http://www.anonyspace.com/ as retrieved on Nov 4, 2006 16:31:50 GMT.
A PR3 page proves my point further, little backlinks, Live PageRank is bad. Last cached 6 weeks ago. Horrible.

This is Google‘s cache of http://www.davidtenemaza.com/ as retrieved on Dec 4, 2006 00:09:21 GMT.
My own personal page, was cached not so long ago. I assume due to this it’s Live PageRank should be around 4? Let’s hope so.

I could find countless more PR4 and PR3 sites to show you further how backlinks and the cache have a immediate implication on the Live Page Rank, what’s more so, it renders the PageRank metric useless since the real important thing is when the site was last visited anyway. You don’t want a link on a site which says it is PR5 but was last cached a month ago, think about all the time Google will take to get to that page, and then it has to get to your link as well.

I hope this post has given people some insight on what Live Page Rank actually is, and why everyone should stop worrying so much about the little green bar and using different tools to find out where to get links from. Have fun marketing your sites, and I hope next time someone asks you to exchange links you will look at Google cache and Yahoo! backlinks instead of the useless green bar.

Today I came across an article that astonished me. The title was enough to cause the feeling. After all, ever since I was a little kid everyone kept telling me that “practice makes perfect” and today some research is going to try and prove my mentors wrong?

“The nervous system was not designed to do the same thing over and over again,” says Churchland, whose team investigated the way the brain plans and calculates motion. So basically by teaching monkeys to do the same thing over and over and noticing no improvement after 1000 tries, these researchers are trying to say that if you practice hard enough you won’t make it anyway. That you cannot improve after a certain point. I believe this is silly. Thousands of athletes that train everyday can’t be wrong. The more you do something the better you get at it. Of course after a certain point you just cannot see the improvements because they are so slight that they are imperceptible, but they are there. Try it, start programming in PHP everyday, start kicking that football daily, do your kata daily. Film yourself if you need to, you will notice the improvements, no matter how slight they may be, the improvements will be there.

Mmm… tomatoes are definitely interesting. The whole argument on whether they are fruits or vegetables makes them interesting enough. However, today we’ll talk about eating them. I’ve met many people that “do not eat” tomatoes. For some weird reason they just don’t like them, but even if you don’t like them you should eat them anyway. Here is why.